Algren at Sea (62 page)

The air is conditioned, the drinks expensive, the women good-looking: and the drop from booths to brothels so fast that any of these women might have a gala night and yet be over the edge the night after.

Over the edge and down is an easy drop, where everyone lives on a ledge. It's only a bit more sudden for her, and only a bit more steep, than
it is for the red-collared bellboy, leaping for tips on the red-plush rugs of the Grand Hotel: let a desk clerk catch him picking up a few rupees changing money on the side and it's back to the walks, but leave your little red collar behind. Calcutta is the place, whatever your job, where the drop is steepest; and the drop from the bars is steepest of all: always some baby-face never seen before hustling your tricks before your eyes. And just that fast the knowledge comes: you're waiting for men other women don't want.

The darker women of Ezekiel's seem less estranged than those of the Anglo strain. The girls from Assam, Nepal and Kashmir belong to themselves because they belong to India. But, despite her Indian robes, the Anglo who feels she truly belongs to Essex or Oxford or Kent, belongs neither to India nor to the West. She belongs only to the seaman who mounts her.

That's how it is in The Orient, men. That's how it
really
is.

A tug on my sleeve turned me to face an Anglo in Western dress, her reddish-blond hair worn long; and her eye-shadow trying to hide the tiredness of her eyes.

“See that bloody nay-gur?” she confided—“the very nerve of 'im—awskin' me to drink with the like of
'im
. O, I thanked
'im
like a lydy—‘Thank you ever so kindly all the same'—but would you mind sitting by me here so's he won't come back—there's a good chap. Bartender! Two whiskeys straight!”

I'd heard fake-cockney spoken before, but this one went at it as though she'd been listening to Audrey Hepburn.

She kept on and on about that “bloody nay-gur” until, turning my head from her, I found myself eye-to-eye with a woman whose eyes were warm with light. Her hair, piled high, was so black it had a bluish sheen. One of the dusky kind of a country I could not place.

“Of what country are you?” I asked her.

“I am of Assam. We are a hill people.”

“Your name?” I asked.

“Martha.”

“Can you leave here?”

“Cannot now.”

“I'll wait.”

She shook her head: no, that wouldn't do. Instead, she took a stub of a pencil from her handbag and wrote, on the inside of a book of matches:

“You come there midnight,” she instructed me, swung herself off the stool and slipped away into the mob of milling seamen.

“Now there's some say a nay-gur's all one and the same, but how
I
were brought up—” the red-haired monologist's voice kept turning like a barber's pole, stripe after stripe, getting nowhere at all. I decided to walk back to the ship and show up, around midnight, at Kanani Mansions.

This was in that twilit Indian hour when bazaars are shadowed and beggars rest.

The voices of Calcutta, that great city, change then from the loud cries of the workaday world to murmurous pleas of evening. Nobody knows how many people there are in Calcutta.

Nor how many cats died yesterday there.

Nobody knows how many cats were born in Calcutta yesterday.

All The-Committee-For-Counting-The-Cats-Of-Calcutta is certain about is that there are going to be more cats in Calcutta tomorrow than there are today.

Nobody knows why it is that crows pursue hawks on the quais of Calcutta; while in every other port it is the hawks that pursue the crows.

All The-Committee-For-Counting-The-Hawks-Of-Calcutta is sure about is that, if the crows keep it up, there are going to be fewer hawks in Calcutta tomorrow than there are today.

Nobody knows how many cows there are in Calcutta. All The-Committee-For-Counting-The-Cows-Of-Calcutta is sure about is that some are standing up but others are lying down. It looks like the work of The-Committee-For-Counting-The-Cows-Of-Calcutta will have to be divided into a Committee-For-Cows-Standing-Up and a Committee-For-Counting-Cows-Lying-Down.

Nobody knows why the dogs of Calcutta never bark, but run away. All that The-Committee-For-Counting-The-Dogs-Of-Calcutta can report is that you have to catch a dog before you can count him—and how can you count him when he runs away?

At this writing it appears that there are going to be more people on
The-Committee-For-Counting-People-In-Calcutta at this time tomorrow than there are today.

We plan to tackle that as soon as The-Committee-Dividing-The-Work-Of-The-Committee-For-Counting-Cows has been organized.

A bureaucrat of nine fell into step beside me, wearing only a pair of ragged shorts. His arms, thin as reeds, had been tattooed with a butterfly on one arm and a cobra on the other.

“Go to ship, Papa?” he wanted to know.

I nodded yes.

“You go wrong way to ship, Papa.”

I was going the right way. But if I believed I was going wrong I would hire him to guide me, and he'd take me to the ship by another route. He took my hand. I took it away.

“You want to go to American movie, Papa?”

I didn't answer. He kept stepping right with me. I increased my pace. He increased his.

“You want to go to library, Papa?”

I made no answer. His hard little fingernails clawed my arm. I came to a dead stop.

He deadstopped too.

I made a feinting movement to the right.

He feinted to my right.

I feinted to the left. He feinted to my left.

I made a fast u-turn and hurried in the opposite direction. He hurried with me. I broke into a run. He ran with me. I stopped to get my breath. He stopped too.

“Don't you have a home?” I asked him.

He nodded. Yes. He had a home.

“Why don't you go there then?”

“Cannot go to home without
baksheesh,
Papa.”

I offered him a dime. He shook his head. No.

“What's wrong with a dime?” I wanted to know.

“Quarter,
Papa.”

“Go to hell,” I told him, and reversed my direction back toward the ship.

He stayed beside me. I broke into a run. I was six feet long and he was four, but he maintained the pace. I ran faster.

We ran along a wall. What was on the other side I had no idea—but it
would only take a moment to scoop him up, toss him over and lose him forever. He seemed to divine some such intention; because he put himself out of reaching distance without losing stride.

I ducked, between hacks, across a street: he ducked between hacks with me. I raced back across the same street: he raced with me. Now I had only a few yards to go to a gate he could not enter.

I reached it and leaned against it, knees shaking, heart racing, chest heaving, sweat pouring. He wasn't even out of breath—merely stood there regarding me curiously.

“Eckersize, Papa?”

It
could
be put that way. It felt more like the wildest workout in town.

“
Baksheesh,
Papa?”

I handed him a cigar.

“Match, Papa?”

The
Malaysia Mail
loomed ominously at the quai. A line of porters were toting sacks of flour off her into a warehouse. Danielsen was leaning over the rail. He watched me climbing the ramp as if waiting to tell me something.

“I thought you were at Ezekiel's,” I told him.

“Customs are questioning the old man,” he explained, “they found a thousand watches behind Manning's medicine cabinet. He thought his medicine cabinet had immunity from inspection.”

I started to feel elation; then my elation died. “What do they want with the old man?”

“They want to know whether he was in on it.”

“Do you think so?”

“No.”

“How much could he have gotten for the loot?”

“At least thirty thousand.”

“I'd never have given him credit for the nerve,” I had to admit.

It came to me, at last, how strongly fear had been driving Manning.

 

In my stateroom I picked up an accusation of Hemingway, yellow with years, written by a critic named Rascoe, now forgotten, in the thirties. Hemingway was infantile when he had written
The Sun Also Rises
and had since grown increasingly childish, Rascoe had decided. On the other hand, James T. Farrell had reached the full flowering of his maturity. Well, good.

I found another review, of a decade later, entitled “The Dark Night of
Ernest Hemingway,” which proclaimed Hemingway's failure “because there is no freedom in work when it becomes compulsion. The word for that is anarchy—a strange God to put before God. Personally, I would settle for just one story in which the Ten Commandments did not get kicked all over the place.” When Billy Graham came along Hemingway lost
this
critic for certain.

If Hemingway hadn't written himself out in the twenties, as Rascoe had announced, he'd certainly written himself out in the thirties—left-wing critics were agreed by the forties: the writer to watch, however, was no longer Farrell. Now it was Howard Fast.

Somehow or other Hemingway
must
have managed to keep writing through the forties, because, by the fifties, it was clearly understood that now he had
really
written himself out. There was always somebody else who was more mature, someone more profound; someone more promising. Someone more true.

Yet the forties had passed, and the fifties had passed, and new critics came on and old critics passed; and new writers came on, and old writers failed and still Hemingway stood them off. Like Sal Maglie, he had nothing left and yet he won ball games. And still he went to the wars and still he went to the bullfights and still he enjoyed his life against all the rules: until he had not only the full pack of American Podhoretzes in pursuit, but European Podhoretzes as well.

“I do not like that old man,” one boy, withered by bitterness, because others were richer, wrote for
L' Express,
“for certain reasons I have simmered all along in the reading of his books. This man is a comedian who during all his life walked around with his testicles for a necklace. But I do suspect that he has none, and that he is a comedian whose literature, by means of tricks, realizes nothing more than the assumptions of
Reader's Digest.
Ernesto's virility is wine and literature. Don Ernesto is afflicted with an awfully sly and wicked look. Hiding behind his beard, Don Ernesto has a mischievous air, mischievous,
very
mischievous.”

I remembered this withered boy. He'd once petitioned Jean-Paul Sartre for employment as a secretary, but had later to be dismissed for selling old manuscripts of Sartre's on the sly. The game worked so long as buyers were interested only in collecting—when one began publishing, somebody had to go. He went. Apparently in pursuit of Hemingway. Some people can't wait to get rich.

“In nearly all of Hemingway's books we feel his sympathy with those who are worthy of it,” one faint-praiser observed; failing to realize that the great thing about the man's books is their sympathy for those unworthy of it.

“There are no
women
in his books!” Professor Fiedler exclaims. “If in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Hemingway has written the most absurd love-scene in the history of the American novel it is not because he lost momentarily his skill and authority. It is a giveaway—a moment which illuminates the whole erotic content of his fiction.”

Catch that “if.” Because when the Professor himself revealed a homosexual relationship between Huck Finn and Nigger Jim, he extended absurdity in love scenes into naked asininity. Thereby illuminating nothing but the Professor.

Well, there's one on every campus. In Fiedler we have the classic mediocrity avenging itself for its deprivation. His method is the equivalent process, in academic terms, of Hollywood writers in “licking a book into shape.”

Fiedler employs symbolism to drain art of its life. He does not criticize: he adapts. By transferring the writer's meaning into arbitrary abstractions, he can leave any work for dead. We find, for example, that Hemingway's description of Mount Kilimanjaro, in
The Short Happy Life of Francis MacComber
, as “wide as all the world, great, high and unbelievably white”
really
means (says the Professor) “the whiteness from which the American author tries so vainly to flee, the bland whiteness of the irrational taboo in Melville, and antarctic whiteness of polar disaster in Poe, the whiteness of the White Goddess herself—who having been denied as giver of life and source of love, must be recognized as dealer of death!”